Vox Popoli

This is the annual VPFL call for fantasy football league coaches. Each player will inherit a team from last year except the returning stalwarts, namely myself aka Mounds View Meerkats aka the Piranha of the Serengeti, the White Buffalo aka Greenfield Grizzlies, the returning champion Masonville Marauders, and, of course, because every team needs a gimme, Nate aka Burns ICU.

The sole caveat is that if you’re not going to actively manage your team, don’t join. Last year, we had a few teams that were a bit shaky; if you suspect you might have issues then I’d encourage you to solicit an assistant manager from the blog. Preference will be given to those who wanted to play last year but couldn’t.

For those who have managed a VPFL team in the past, Huck and Sean have started a VPFL alumni team. If you’re interested, note it here. I’ll post the results for both teams every week so long as Sean keeps me updated on the results of the VP-AFL.

The Georgian Foreign Ministry reported that Russian aircrafts have completely destroyed the harbor of Poti, in the immediate vicinity of Supsa, a vital oil terminal.

It’s interesting to consider these developments in light of both Pat Buchanan’s recent WND column and VDH’s A War Like No Other. Both of these stand in harsh contrast to the Fukuyama/Neocon position that seeding democracy is likely to be a successful means of expanding foreign influence in the long term.

I woudn’t pretend to know. I tend to suspect they don’t either. But shockingly, it has been discovered that normal women really don’t want men to be women:

I will tell you about the main article that caught my eye–the one on men acting like women in Scandinavia. The author, Elizabeth Debold, sets out to Scandinavia to find out how “gender equality” is playing itself out in that culture…. A guy named Bo states, “We end up relating to women in a way that is more like woman to woman, not man to woman. We are feminized in our relationships, and they don’t last.”

Before you begin relating to women like her girlfriend, it may serve you well to stop and consider the fate of her historical friendships. In general, most women tend to place their romantic relationships well ahead of their friendships, regardless of the message the Spice Girls and Sex in the City tried to portray. In real life, Samantha would have seduced Mr. Big, thus ending her relationship with Carrie, Charlotte would have disappeared for weeks at a time whenever she began dating someone regularly, and Miranda would have been acting distant and weird for months before showing up one day with a female life partner who resembled Pete Rose and vanishing, never to be seen again. Within seven years, Carrie would be completely out of contact with all three of them except for the annual Christmas card from Charlotte.

The problem is that very few individuals of either sex truly know what they want; if they say they do, they’re probably wrong. Women in particular will swear up and down that they want X, but what that actually means is that right at that particular moment, they THINK they want X. Chasing X is a fool’s game; no man can MAKE a woman happy. A woman can only choose to be happy or unhappy on her own and trying to make her happy by rushing to comply with her every demand and quaking with fear over her least displeasure is one sure way to drive her away, full of contempt for you.

I don’t pretend to know what women want. I truly don’t care. It’s simply irrelevant to me, as completely and utterly irrelevant as what I want is to women. This is why it’s important for a man’s inclinations to be in some sort of natural and general alignment with his wife’s, so that neither one of them have to spend much time thinking about the matter. Now, this doesn’t mean that one can’t bestir oneself from one’s general indifference to help one’s wife achieve what she wants just as one would help out a good friend, but seriously, how many guys sit around and worry about whether their best friend is happy or not 24 hours a day?

If somebody’s willing to kill for you, die for you, and help you bury a dead body without asking questions first, that’s all you can possibly hope to find in a friend or a spouse. No rational creature can possibly demand slavish devotion to anticipating its momentary whims; stay very far away from any man or woman who does.

Precisely no one is shocked as John Edwards finally admits the affair that the mainstream media couldn’t bring itself to report back when it actually mattered:

Former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards on Friday admitted to an extramarital affair while his wife was battling cancer. He denied fathering the woman’s daughter. Edwards told ABC News that he lied repeatedly about the affair with 42-year-old Rielle Hunter but said that he didn’t love her.

Clearly he lied about love, which is no crime. Or, not-love, I suppose. Whatever, won’t people stop harassing this poor man? He’s not an important public figure like Joel Osteen’s wife, Christie Brinkley, or Britney Spears, he gave up being a major Democratic Party candidate for President MONTHS ago! You’d think a man whose wife was dying would get some respect for his privacy.

1. John Edwards admits an affair with Rielle Hunter. CHECK
2. John Edwards confesses to fathering Rielle Hunter’s child.
3. John Edwards changes his name to Jeanette, co-adopts Rielle Hunter’s child with Razor Ramon HG.

Now, what was that about the reliability of the National Enquirer versus the mainstream media again? It seems to me the evidence suggests we may need to rethink our dismissal of all those bizarre reports about bat children and aliens. And I wonder how long after the election it will take for all the true stories about Obama to find their way out to the public… assuming Hillary doesn’t find a way to put them out there first.

Since there’s so little else going on elsewhere in the world:

Russia sent troops and dozens of tanks and armoured vehicles into the breakaway Georgian province of South Ossetia today, vowing to protect its citizens in a move described by Tbilisi’s pro-Western government as an act of war. A South Ossetian rebel minister said that more than 1,000 people had been killed in overnight shelling of the city of Tskhinvali, the separatist capital which Georgia claimed today to have captured.

Looks like the Russian reboot process may be coming to an end. I know there were some Soviet defectors who claimed that the end of the Soviet Union was little more than a KGB-run operation to shuffle things around and free itself from the shackles of Communist ideology while convincing the West that the totalitarian beast was dead.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense, given the declining demographics, but perhaps Putin and company have a plan to address that too. You know what I’m thinking: clone army!

Byron York postulates a scenario:

[L]ook at it this way: Hillary Clinton speaks to the convention on Women’s Equality Day, amid a big celebration of the role of women in the Democratic Party, and everyone is feeling good about how inclusive they are — and then, just hours after celebrating the right of women to vote, the convention denies a vote to the millions of women who supported Hillary Clinton? How’s that gonna work? Might it be that the fortuitous occasion of Women’s Equality Day will actually create pressure for a floor vote?

I had no idea there was a Women’s Equality Day, my impression was that every day was supposed to be Women’s Equality Day. Of course, one wonders what the purpose is, now that women have achieved the equality of a) being able to have a man stripped of his possessions and kicked out of his house on the mere basis of her accusation of domestic violence, and, b) being permitted to shoot dead a sleeping man without lasting legal consequences.

But this makes Hillary’s path to the Presidency clear. She can pull this thing out even more easily than York suggests by arranging for a private conference with Obama at his house, then calling the police, telling them that she’s his wife and accusing him of hitting her. Obama gets hauled off to jail in handcuffs before the real story gets straightened out, the flash bulbs go off and his race is ended before reaching Denver. How could America possibly vote for the man who hit Hillary?

Alternatively, she can just wait until it’s confirmed that he’s not eligible for the presidency due to his fake Certificate of a Consular Birth Abroad. That would work too.

Krauthammer sums it up very well indeed: “The Italian Communist party could win this election. The American Democratic party is trying its best to lose it.“

If I were a Democratic strategist, I’d be thinking very, very hard about out how to get Obama off the ballot at or before the convention. If he’s this close to McCain in the polls after 18 months of nothing but favorable press, I think he’s in very serious trouble. Remember, at this point, Michael Dukakis was 16 points ahead. Moreover, the idea that Obama would crush McCain in the debates has pretty much vanished thanks to more idiotic off-the-cuff remarks in the last six weeks than Dan Quayle made in his entire political career.

David Brooks writes an uncharacteristically funny column in the New York Times:

All my life I’ve been a successful pseudo-intellectual, sprinkling quotations from Kafka, Epictetus and Derrida into my conversations, impressing dates and making my friends feel mentally inferior. But over the last few years, it’s stopped working. People just look at me blankly. My artificially inflated self-esteem is on the wane. What happened?

It’s quite amusing; I particularly liked his concept of the early discarder. I have to confess that I’ve always been somewhat mystified by the concept of an intellectual vogue since I like what I like and it doesn’t trouble me at all that some of my favorite writers, formerly names often heard dropped by the sort of meme lords Brooks mocks, are now passe. There are few things I despise more than a pretense that one has experience of things that one actually has not; it’s amazing how much posery one inadvertantly uncovers merely by happening to live in Europe.

Do tell me again how very European it is to live in Quebec, mon ami….

Spacebunny is always amused when women of a certain age and income level are so good as to tell her what Italy is like, based on the two weeks they spent three summers ago traversing Florence, Venice, and the Cinque Terre. I once nearly had to kick a guest out of our house when he furiously insisted that as an experienced international businessman, he did too know how to make European phone calls, the fact that every time he tried to dial a hotel in Venice he reached someone who spoke only German notwithstanding.

It’s certainly pleasant to know things, but knowledge doesn’t actually make you a better person. Everyone is ignorant of many things, since it’s not possible to be a true polymath in the Age of Information. For all my extensive knowledge of World of Warcraft and Age of Conan, I don’t know much about Vanguard – which is fine – or Everquest – which is not – or Ultima Online – which is really reprehensible. I’m also shockingly ignorant of American Idol and a whole host of pop cultural items, but to be honest, with regards to this sort of thing there’s a good case to be made that ignorance is bliss. I certainly wouldn’t sneer at those who don’t keep up on the state of NFL salary caps, unless, of course, they’re trying to tell me that the Jets are going to keep Chad Pennington and Brett Favre. And I don’t care if Hesse has been out of fashion since the ’70s, I love his novels anyways.

But if it’s pleasurable to be a quote-spewing pseudo-intellectual, it’s even more pleasurable to puncture their pretensions of knowing that which they pretend to know. For example, I would guess that for every 20 people who bring up Euthyphro in a discussion about morality, only one has actually read it… and only one in one hundred of those who have read it understood it well enough to recognize what a dishonest sham it is. That being said, my experience in the response to my last novel has taught me that from the writer’s perspective, it’s more important to create the illusion of brilliance than to create something genuinely brilliant* on a wavelength that no reader can reasonably be expected to detect. I expect the more alert regulars will understand the implications of this lesson….

Speaking of non-pseudos, it is my pleasure to declare that the following individuals have demonstrated that they do actually know their Thucydides and may henceforth feel free to drop quotes from The History of the Peloponnesian War in very good conscience. The three individuals named in bold merit particular distinction as Grand Thucydideans, as they tied for the high score on the final at 96 percent. DocBrown also merits GT status as the Most Valuable Commenter throughout the course of our collaborative reading.

zeno
jSinSaTx
John**
repomanuel
SGTGideonsDad
Ian.yclept
Scott
Art
WLindsayWheeler
Wendy
Galactus
Connor
DocBrown
Jack
rdkraus
Giraffe
Rusty
SandmansView
MikeLaRoche
AWiserManThanI
Somboed
JK
Nate

*I’m not claiming to have written anything brilliant; it’s not for me to judge. But no one can have judged that aspect of Wrath at all, as said wavelength has remained undetected to this point.

**John scored 23/25 but was awarded an extra point for catching my error in conflating Demosthenes and Nicias in the question about “the brilliant Athenian general” on the final.

I noticed Mr. Dr. Helen, aka Instapundit, is running a U.S. presidential poll, so I thought it might be interesting to compare the results of VP readers with Instapundit readers. Here are the results of the two polls:

Instapundit
7,978 votes
82% – John McCain (R)
09% – None of the Above
05% – Bob Barr (L)
04% – Barack Obama (D)
00% – Ralph Nader (I)

Vox Popoli
1,022 votes
52% – None of the Above
21% – Bob Barr (L)
13% – Barack Obama (D)
13% – John McCain (R)
01% – Ralph Nader (I)

There are three interesting things to observe here. First, VP readers appear to be significantly more active on this blog than are Instapundit readers; if the VP readership was 12.8 percent of Insty’s total, it would average 30k daily readers, not 4k. Second, VP is very clearly not the Republican haven that it is commonly supposed to be by liberals and unlike most blogs it is not read only by the echo chamber. I was extremely surprised at how Republican-heavy Instapundit turned out to be. And third, for all its radical libertarian extremism, VP is arguably more in tune with the mood of the general public than most political blogs, including Instapundit, as it’s quite possible that at least 52 percent of the American electorate will join the 534 readers here – and me – in refusing to vote for any of the declared candidates referenced in this poll.

But it was very, very wrong of me to do so:

A British commuter was thrown on to a railway line after she told two youths to stop smoking on a station platform on Wednesday. The woman, whose identity is not known, suffered burns and a suspected broken collar bone and was taken to the hospital after the incident, at Farningham Road station in Kent during the rush hour shortly after 7a.m.

This is amusing for several reasons. First, despite not being a smoker myself, I loathe all anti-smoking puritans. I’m not saying these busybodies all deserve to die, but the obnoxious way they often confront smokers makes me want to punch them in the face. I can’t imagine how the smokers themselves must feel. Second, it’s such a completely absurd escalation of the situation. Nine times out of ten, a polite “would you mind not doing that, please” will be well-received by most people; if a person doesn’t accede to such a reasonable request, it’s not very wise to press further. You’re making a request, not a demand, after all. If, on the other hand, you’re actually making a demand, then you’d best have the means to back it up.

Third, given how I suspect the situation developed, it’s a cogent illustration of the impotence of female reliance upon the law. I suspect we’re going to be seeing more and more of this behavior as it becomes eminently clear to younger men that the law is becoming ever more hostile to their sex. One can just picture the woman imperiously making her righteous demand of the two young thugs in the full confidence that the law is not only on her side, but protecting her, then finding herself sailing through the air as her position and her misplaced confidence are met with a speedy and forceful rebuttal. In these decadent overlawyered days, many of us have forgotten that the law is little more than a mirage of mutual consent; as that consent is withdrawn by more individuals, the essentially immaterial nature of the law becomes increasingly apparent to everyone.

Fourth and finally, it is such a perfect example of the progression from a once-civilized equalitarian society into the feral society of the future. The equalitarian society capable of conceiving and constructing a world that removes from the individual the ability to decide what substances he is allowed to put in his own mouth is precisely the sort of society that is very likely to produce barbarians of the sort that were smoking on the platform in open defiance of that dictate.

The joys of staying home with nothing to do:

Dr. Scott Haltzman, author of “The Secrets of Happily Married Women,” says stay-at-home wives constitute a growing niche. “In the past few years, many women who are well educated and trained for career tracks have decided instead to stay at home,” he says. While his research is ongoing, he estimates that more than 10 percent of the 650 women he’s interviewed who choose to stay home are childless.

Daniel Buccino, a Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine clinical social worker and psychotherapist, says stay-at-home wives are the latest “status symbols.”

I’m of two minds about this supposed trend, or more likely, this latest media attempt to spot a trend in the making. While it’s certainly not my business how married couples choose to order their lives, while I’m very much in favor of stay-at-home mothers, and while I have in the past pointed out how the realities of the income tax and day care expenses render the net income and opportunity cost of the average working mother to be negative, I’ve also been witness to the very real downside of the completely unoccupied woman.

Now, it’s one thing if the woman is a genuine homemaker or seriously devoted to some creative endeavor such as writing or painting. My grandmother never worked after my mother got married; she was a painter and if her landscapes were largely unremarkable, they were both competent and visually attractive. She and my grandfather also maintained a garden and courtyard that bordered on the spectacular; the sheer aesthetic pleasure of visiting their house remains one of my favorite recollections. And, of course, one must remember that not all couples voluntarily elect evolutionary dead-end status; blaming the barren for their childless state is simply piling on.

But it’s another thing altogether if the wife’s idea of homemaking is “managing the help” and her real occupation is bitching about acquaintances at the local coffee shop with her similarly unoccupied friends. Anyone who has grown up in a sufficiently wealthy community will know what I mean; a group of such women gossiping away are like a poisonous swamp giving off a toxic miasma capable of polluting relationships two and three steps removed. It’s little wonder that so many of them end up divorced; there is truth in the old adage about idle hands.

I wonder, too, how many wives would be pleased to support a husband in his decision if he came home and declared that staying home and allowing her to support him was something that he wanted to do? I find it very hard to imagine any normal woman simply smiling and saying, “Why, yes, of course, darling, whatever makes you happy!” Now, the vagaries of the current economy being what they are, there will certainly be times when a couple with children will determine it to be advantageous for the family if the mother works and the father cares for the children. I certainly can’t cast any stones in this regard, as I’d always planned to marry a high-paid international model myself and had in fact made significant progress along those lines when I happened to meet this gorgeous blonde who looked like an Eddie Bauer model doing the whole look-I’m-wearing-an-Irish-sweater-and-walking-a-dog-on-a-cold-Atlantic-beach thing. As it turned out, she was actually a nanny. Whoops… and therefore in the place of a decadent life of writing jaded accounts of the existential ennui that results from living a five-star lifestyle in London, Paris, and Rome, I was forced to come up with some other means of avoiding a commute, an office and obscenely early Monday morning meetings.

The danger for married couples is that what makes an overwhelmed 25-year old woman happy and content may not necessarily do so five or ten years in the future. It’s boredom that makes the housewife desperate. Still, money isn’t even close to being the most important thing in life, so if you can afford to live a life of lehzhure instead of grinding away in pursuit of someone else’s dime, that’s great. But one must have a purpose in life; you can live very well without money or a paying job, but not without a definite reason to get up in the morning.

Or, the crack of noon, as we civilized men of letters prefer.